Meta-Reflections

In this personal reflection, Phil Lieberman addresses the unique pain that accompanies the loss of an abusive parent and considers the uneasy coherence of this pain with Jewish traditions of mourning.

Shmuel Hain Reviews Chaim Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law.

The exhaustive Talmud commentary of Provencal scholar Menachem ben Shlomo Ha-Meiri was largely disregarded by Jewish scholars for centuries. Its revived popularity in the twentieth century presents a puzzle, then, for which multiple explanations have been offered. Michael Broyde considers the approaches advanced by his teacher Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and by others, before proposing his own explanation, focusing on Meiri's unique level of access to and use of Yerushalmi texts.

What sort of powers did Hazal have in the first century? Ari Lamm wonders.

  Isaac (Amichai) Roszler Rabbi Joseph Hirsch Dünner (1833-1911), also known as Ritzad, was one of the first modern academic scholars of the Bavli, the Babylonian...

The new book Reclaiming Dignity is taking the Anglo Jewish world by storm. Why? Emmanuel Bloch, who wrote his dissertation on the subject of tzeniut, argues that the work capitalizes on and extends a new, revolutionary halakhic and conceptual framework for tzeniut that has emerged only in recent years - one that offers a lens to the “soul of contemporary Jewish Orthodoxy.”

Lehrhaus Editor Shlomo Zuckier examines two divergent understandings of Jewish law.

Steven Gotlib reviews Eugene Korn’s To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values, a book which asks hard questions about whether Halakhah can integrate with the demands of contemporary ethics.

Rabbi Ezra Schwartz reviews Nishmat HaBayit, a responsa collection by the Yoatzot Halacha of Nishmat

Judah Kerbel explores how differing approaches to listening to music during Sefirat ha-Omer balance the appropriate role for subjectivity in halakhic decision-making.